Saturday, October 12, 2013

An Ugly Statistic

(Los Angeles, California)

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris recently unveiled the first state-wide statistics on California’s truancy crisis, which reveal that, last year alone, 1 million elementary school students were truant and 250,000 elementary school students missed 18 or more school days at a cost of $1.4 billion in lost funds to California school districts.

In addition, a correlation between truancy and violence was reported.

As the District Attorney of San Francisco, Harris started a citywide truancy initiative in 2006. In the course of investigating factors contributing to the city’s violent crime rate, she found that 94% of San Francisco homicide victims under age 25 were high school dropouts.